


Actions Maketh Man

by multipurposetoolguy



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (bc he does hack up a bunch of padawans), (from Ben's pov which reminds me), (he's about 18 here i fudged canon a bit), (its complicated), Attempted Murder, Ben POV, Ben is not in a good place for this whole fic let me just say outright, Blood and Violence, Canon Compliant, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional Trauma, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Grooming, I would like it on the record that I mcfuckin HATE snoke so jot that down, Murder, Oh also, References to Depression, Young Ben Solo, basically Ben's account of and leading up to the Event (TM) at the temple, pre-TLJ, there are lots of padawan ocs in this sorry if its distracting but i needed names dangit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-10 23:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13511988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/multipurposetoolguy/pseuds/multipurposetoolguy
Summary: Ben is asleep and not yet a man when Luke makes a devastating decision. When he wakes, Ben must make a few of his own.Some deeds cannot be undone, and on a peaceful planet where some less-than-peaceful things happen, no one walks away from it the same person they walked in.





	Actions Maketh Man

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this knocking around inside my head since my second viewing of TLJ, I just really wanted to get inside Ben's head that night when everything changed and just, root around in all that angst. I feel I've achieved this. 
> 
> This is essentially Ben's account leading up to, throughout, and after the Incident(TM) at the temple as a padawan, so it's entirely his POV and as such he interprets things more dramatically than he should and sometimes incorrectly. So be mindful of that, and heed the tags because we all know what went down. 
> 
> That being said, I have used all the canon information given to us in the flashbacks in TLJ but I've also bridged the gaps with my own interpretations of how things could've gotten to that point and what might've happened after, so while this is technically canon compliant I am playing in the sandbox a little bit. 
> 
> One last note, I believe Ben is 22-23 when he burns down the temple and goes to Snoke, but in the movie he struck me as so young and vulnerable I starting playing with this as if he were a smidge younger, and I found that it hurt more that way so I just sorta. Smudged canon a bit, and made him 18ish here. Creative license, and whatnot, let's go with that. 
> 
> (there's also a teeny tiny fleeting moment Ben has of suicidal ideation, if you're sensitive to this subject hit me up on [tumblr](http://multi-purpose-tool-guy.tumblr.com) and I'll explain further!)
> 
> FINALLY REAL QUICK I wanna give a shoutout to my beebs [droneshard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Droneshard/works) for betaing this and putting up with my twin addictions to commas and em dashes, and holding my hand through the whole process. I am also forever grateful to my sweet peach [theweddingofthefoxes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theweddingofthefoxes/works) and my bro [hikash0](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikash0/works) for being so encouraging and excited and cheering me on, I basically wrote this for the three of you, so thank you for being awesome <3 
> 
> With that all squared away, I hope you all enjoy! :)

“Patience is power tamed, Ben.” Luke had told him not for the first time, pacing in wide, slow circles around him as his soft leather boots crunched in the gravel. “Take all that energy you're feeling and focus it, direct it. Don't just try and grab at it barehanded like a live wire. That's a great way to get electrocuted.” 

One of the others had failed to hide their laughter at that, one of the ones Ben didn’t care for at all, and he bared his teeth. The pile of smooth white stones he’d been attempting to delicately stack with the Force shuddered and blew apart, stones flying out in all directions and knocking over a few of the other students’ own stacks. 

He hadn’t even  _ meant  _ to throw them apart, he was trying to keep the boiling of his blood out of the cosmic link connecting them all and  _ be better,  _ but he was angry and it just happened, like a breath, like a blink. All of this, everything they’ve been doing here is supposed to be about control, about  _ connecting  _ and Ben feels like a bead left off of the chain, out of step and out of sync and he  _ hates  _ it. He hates the farce of balance and he hates his stupid uncomfortable bedroll and he hates the others who are laughing and the others who are afraid of him already and it’s only been- kriff, how long has it been?- and he  _ hates it-  _

The other Padawans’ fallen stacks, leaves scattered around, stray rucksacks and training rods had all eerily lifted off the ground as one as Ben’s anger mounted; the others backing away from their circle warily. They floated there, suspended unnaturally in the air until Luke pressed a steadying hand to Ben’s chest. 

“Breath, Ben, just breath. Let go of your expectation and just  _ do.”  _

Everything fell at once to the ground, strings cut, thudding a staccato into the dirt. 

_ Just do.  _ If it truly was so simple a task that Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master’s only instruction is ‘just do it already’, he truly must be the wrong fucking kid for this Jedi gig. He dropped his arm to his side where it had been pulled taut and grasping at nothing, clenched his jaw until it hurt and then clenched it harder. 

Luke tried to pick up his arm and gently reposition it and Ben wrenched his wrist away. “Don’t,” he bit out, brushing past him with shoulders growing broader every day and stalking off into the treeline. 

_ Just do,  _ he says. His feet fall heavy in the mulch, every step taking him further from the disappointment written all over Luke’s face.  _ Look within, find your own answers.  _ Ben didn’t come here to teach his kriffing  _ self  _ how to be a Jedi now did he? His Uncle, his  _ family  _ is supposed to be helping him handle this unbridled thing inside him, help him control it so he stops breaking things and scaring everyone (scaring his  _ mother _ ) and putting distance between him and everything he loves. Luke is supposed to be teaching him things that the Masters used, ways that they harnessed their connection to the Force and used it to help people, generally make things better for everyone. 

And to Ben’s struggling, he says:  _ Just do _ .

Fine. The student will become the teacher if that’s what Luke damn well wants. 

He breaks through the treeline into a clearing similar to the one he’s just left behind, but smaller and less exposed, the trees surrounding it denser. The sun still drifts gently in from above, and Ben collects an armful of stones and twigs and dumps them in a heap where it’s brightest, on a patch of soft grass at the very center of the meadow. 

He stands a few feet away, arm a hard line jutting out towards the pile in disarray, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t think of Luke as he tries to breath, to feel the Force humming in his bones and down through his shoes into the earth, through every blade of grass and every stone in his little pile. He feels all of it at once, everything breathing and living and dying and connected, like a maze of gossamer thread and just as devastatingly fragile.

Sweat drips from the tip of his nose down onto his robes as his hand trembles with the effort, trying to funnel all of the surging energy around and within him into the precision required for this task. The stones tremble too, shaking as he touches them with just the barest press of otherworldly fingers.

The thread snaps, energy pulses through the clearing, and sticks and stones alike go careening into the woods like someone let go of a grenade. 

A howl of bitter anger is ripped from him and he kicks the stone that landed nearest to him, hard. It flies off between the trees with the others and his foot throbs as he falls to sit heavily in the grass, hugging his knees. It’s lush and beautiful and right now it’s infuriating, as it always is in the face of his ever more frequent failure. Like it isn’t bad enough that the others talk about him behind his back, the very grass beneath his feet has to mock him further with its effortless serenity, so at odds with his own temperament.

It makes him think back to his first days here when the planet Luke had picked for the site of his new temple had seemed like a paradise, time here a privilege in itself on top of getting to run away from home and be a true, flesh and blood Jedi. The smell had hit him before anything else, stepping off Luke’s transport into the shimmering grass. The air was warm on his face and in his hair and smelled of baking Tangoo seeds, like his family ate every year on Life Day; earthy and sweet and just faintly enough of home to comfort him.  

It seemed every corner they explored together was even more beautiful and mesmerizingly calm than the last, finding thick grass nearly everywhere underfoot and calm lackadaisical streams, clumps of sparse low trees, majestic stone banks and dazzling waterfalls. Luke had already constructed the temple and their living quarters beforehand, and before he stepped foot inside Ben knew he could be happy here. That night of course the Force seemed to exist to prove him wrong, and their stone huts were blasted with rainfall so heavy Ben had thought the planet would flood and they’d have to abandon ship, go find another oasis. Torrential winds turned every raindrop into a needle aiming for exposed faces and ankles, and even after the rain and the wind had stopped Ben and the others were too afraid to leave the stone huts, the night air buzzing to life with the rasping of insects that sounded like whispers in the night. He’d huddled close to his fellow Padawans through that first night, shivering and soaked to his boots despite the shelter and thinking miserably of  _ balance.  _

That had been his first private lesson, fighting a headache and a sneezing fit in the mud in his would-be paradise. That life is not fair, and despite what he’d assumed growing up hearing adventure stories from his father, it isn’t the Force’s job to be either.  

He lets his legs unfold gracelessly to spread across the grass, heaves a sigh. A leaf flutters from one of the trees overhead and he points a finger, catches it as it drifts and makes it swirl in lazy circles in the air. 

The Force isn’t some superpower that he can play with, he knows that. It’s been drilled into him hard enough by literally everyone in his life, Force sensitive or not. It’s not just about the stuff you can see, it’s so much more than that, but if he could stack blocks with his mind when he couldn’t even stand up to take a piss,  _ why  _ is he having so much fucking trouble with this? He’s always been able to tap into it without thinking about it. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it most of the time, the Force just feels like another limb that he was born with and instinctively knows how to move, how to use it to just. Live his life. 

Being here with the other students and living like a fucking monk seems to be about dissecting the Force and writing a textbook about it, as far as Ben knows. They have to understand  _ why  _ certain things work like they do, what a whole heaping pile of minutia  _ means  _ and how does this particular rock or this particular tree make you  _ feel?  _ It’s tedious, it’s pointless, and it’s banthashit. They are all each of them inherently connected to the Force, it’s a part of them, why do they have to spend so much time  _ talking  _ about it when they should be learning to just  _ do- _

He growls, clenches a fist, pounds it into the dirt. 

_ Stop asking questions and just listen,  _ Luke would say, hands behind his back and bent double for emphasis (dramatics).  _ Listen to what the Force is telling you.  _

Here in the clearing, clouds smeared like crushed fruit overhead and the taste of failure bitter under his tongue, he closes his eyes. Listens. 

All he hears are the creepy fucking bugs. 

He lets the leaf drop and fall the rest of the way to the ground and hauls himself to his feet. 

He breaks unhurriedly through the treeline and heads back towards the compound, his mood ebbing away and leaving him wrung out and exhausted. Hungry too, his stomach groaning in warning. His anger has slipped away with the sunlight and on the walk back through the twilight he feels a pang of guilt for storming away from the lesson. 

Ben knows intimately how fucking slippery the Force can be inside his own head, and sometimes trying to direct it even minutely feels like trying to change the course of a river. It’s this  _ thing  _ inside him, squeezed close to every bone and organ in his body and sharing the space, part of him inherently but feeling too big to fit. He can’t wrap his brain around how he’s supposed to contain any shred of the Force, how he’s supposed to understand it, and Luke is trying to help him do that while not having the added benefit of being inside his head with it, too. (Not that he even wants to be in there sometimes, his own head. Here there be Krayt dragons, and all that.) 

He’s here to learn, to be better, and it’s a hell of a lot better than being at home and breaking plates against walls from across the room and  _ I’m sorry, mom I didn’t mean-  _ and  _ Ben stop, I can’t deal with this right now, your father-  _

Luke is trying to help, underneath the looks and the whispers and the _ calm down Ben, focus Ben,  _ feel _ it Ben, you should know this by now. _ He just needs to buck the fuck up and remember that, sometimes.

 

\--

 

Later, after a blissfully uneventful evening meal when he’s alone (always when he's alone) there's a different kind of whispering thing, stuck between his ears. 

He’s sitting on his bedroll with a pad of yellowed paper open across his legs, sketching a potential design for his first non-practice lightsaber when the tugging starts, a gentle pull at the base of his brain that is familiar but still eerie, even now. The sensation hums and spreads out inside his head, warm and fluttering like silk, just barely brushing the backs of his eyes. He closes them tight, sets down his design and his clay pencil, and hears the ghosting of words that are not his own. 

_ Do not waste guilt on him, he didn’t miss you when you left. _

Ben breathes, slow in slow out. Doesn’t open his eyes. 

“He had to continue the lesson, it’s not everyone else’s fault I fucked it up.” Luke had told him as much, when he met the others for dinner.  _ Missed you at the lesson, kid. You were almost there, Ben.  _ He suspects that the voice knows this, that it had been listening. It often is. 

_ He would have you dilute your strength to play his silly games. He should be helping you harness it, not dampen it.  _

“There’s power in being precise, it’s not-” He bites off the words. He sounds like his uncle. The voice knows this, too, and he hears an irregular rasping tickling the bottoms of his ears that he’s come to know as the closest thing the voice gets to laughter. 

_ He’s glad you left, glad to keep that power from you. You would surpass him, he knows and fears it to be true. You deserve to know power greater than he can imagine, you deserve a true teacher.  _

“He’s not,” He says, but it sits like ice in his mouth. He’s not glad Ben left or he’s not the teacher Ben deserves? He’s not sure which it sounds like or which he means, and the cold of it trickles into his gut, doubt seeping in and making him shiver. He can’t see into Luke’s mind (he and every other Padawan there has tried, he’s sure) but maybe the voice can? Maybe it’s just doing the decent thing, telling him the truth after every failed lesson, every public correction of his technique. Maybe it knows things he doesn’t and is trying to help, fuck,  _ someone  _ in his goddamn life has to be trying to help him, right? They can’t all be-

He blinks his eyes open as his stomach lurches, the rasp of the paper and the cotton of his bedroll falling away and he doesn’t need to look to know where he is. 

The air inside the looming slant of the chamber is so cold he can see his breath if he squints, but the stone floor is warm beneath his feet. The walls are a deep, bottomless red he can feel something else too, underneath, a steady hum just below the surface. 

He knows also without looking that he’s wearing the sharper black robes that he’s always wearing when he’s here, when the voice brings him here to speak privately. They’re stitched with geometric designs and cut to make him look broader, denser. They go all the way up to his neck, and he wears gloves as well when he’s here, black and buttery soft and just like Luke’s only these don’t exist out of shame; hiding outdated tech and old wounds. These he wears for the same reason he wears the rest, he suspects. He feels powerful in this room, dressed not like a student ( _ like a failure like a fuckup, just do Ben just do- _ ) but like a Master, of his own power and his own destiny. 

The room has no doors and no corridors, no openings or closings to speak of, and it should scare him but it doesn’t, instead he relaxes into the comfort of it. The first few times the voice in his head took him here he  _ was  _ afraid, almost badly enough to tell Luke about it and hope he didn’t get snatched up and left there for good, but the voice always brought him back, untouched, like he’d never left. He was younger then and not as wise, and now he knows that the room has no doors because it’s not for anyone else, only for him. He’s the only one who ever comes here, and when he’s gone it sits empty, incomplete, cold. 

Here, in this room, he belongs.

“I’d like to try something, if you’re amenable,” The voice says, more present here and echoing down from where whoever’s voice it is must sit, high up on a raised dais and out of sight. The other constant of this place; the voice is always there with him. 

“I am,” Ben says, loud and round, bolstered by walls without doors and warm stone underfoot. 

He hears the rasping again and before he can get angry wonder what the voice could possibly be laughing at, something materializes in the room not ten feet in front of him. It’s a pile of smooth round stones, almost identical to the ones Luke had used in the lesson. These are jet black, and reflecting the red walls ominously in their polished sheen. 

Ben looks at them, confused. “I know you saw how well this went earlier.” The stones sit there in a heap, glinting, mocking him. 

“It’ll go very differently this time, you’ll find.” It booms down at him. 

Ben is not convinced. “What’s different about this time? I still haven’t mastered it.” 

No rasping now, but it still sounds like the voice wants to laugh at him. It’s putting him on edge. “You’re here now, of course. Your place, not his place. Go on,” The stones soundlessly arrange themselves into a circle on the floor, equidistant from each other and pristine. Waiting. 

Ben sighs, lifts his arm anyway. The leather of the glove shifts as he reaches out, grasping, and it spurs him on. His gloves in his room, his power. The stones begin to rise.

“You have a strength in you that Skywalker only dreams of possessing,” The voice bellows, and the rocks shakily start to move into place, stacking precariously on one another. A drop of sweat rolls down his nose, drips into his black robes and disappears. “You can be so much more than what he is. You  _ will  _ be.”

His hand is shaking, the stones wobbling as they all weave together into the delicate stack he’s aiming for. If one stone is even just a hair out of the place all of them will fall, and he has to focus and steady the force around each one all at once or he’ll fail (again, he’ll fuck it up again and how fucking hard can it be to stack some kriffing rocks and  _ breath Ben focus Ben, just do-)  _

He slips, his focus snapped and hanging slack like a spider’s web, and the stones are just a breath away from right and balanced and  _ he fucked it up again he- just do just do just do-  _

The rocks settle into place smoothly, stacked precariously but solid. They don’t fall, they don’t blow apart and spread across the floor under his temper. They sit there inky and shining, and he did it.

Somehow.

He falls to his knees, heaving for breath, and even his weight thudding against the floor doesn’t topple them. He doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t feel like he’s won. 

The voice sounds smug when it speaks over his ragged breathing. “See what can be accomplished with proper direction, a change of scenery.” 

But Ben doesn’t understand, he felt the Force slip through his fingers, control falling away, they should’ve blown apart like every other time, how did they-? 

“You are supremely gifted, Benjamin, and you do not have to settle with where you are now.” The voice says. “Do not lose sight of who you can become,”

Ben doesn’t reply, can’t stop staring at the gleaming black stones still stacked impossibly in the center of the room. They start to waver in his vision like hot sand under the sun and he tries to blink it away, but the walls are flickering too and everything starts to fade around him, his vision closing in. The voice is fading too, no longer looming above him but back in his head and he hears the last wisp of a murmur before everything goes black. 

_ With a true teacher.  _

He comes to gasping for breath and sitting cross-legged on his bed, exactly where he was, shoulders sagging down from where they’d been frozen ramrod straight while he was gone. When he looks down he’s wearing his daily training robes, beige and fraying at the ends, dirt ground into the knees. His hands are bare. 

The moon had risen while he was away, and it’s sitting fat and green and too-close in the sky outside the hole in his hut that passes for a window. The air feels crawly and strange in the voice’s wake, as it always does. He stands and crosses the room, drawing the threadbare yellow curtains together to block it out. 

He’s still got a while yet before sleep, and the time he tries to set aside for meditation. He doesn’t think it’ll do him any good tonight, pulled and stretched apart as he feels. Instead he sits at his modest wooden desk (identical to the one in every other hut in their compound) and lights a bantha-tallow candle tucked into the corner. 

He takes a deep, centering breath, holds it for as long as he can, and takes out his brushes. The ink tin comes next, then he carefully pulls his transcripts from the desk’s only side drawer.  

The book lays open in front of him to the page he’d marked, one in the set of the Jedi texts that Luke extrapolates lessons and sometimes lectures from. His own copy is nearly done, only a few more sections to copy over and it’ll be finished and in standard Basic. He’d asked Luke if he could translate the texts months ago and he’d relented, and it’s something he looks forward to every night, going little by little and making progress with every stroke. It requires a steady hand and dedicated focus, and unlike the group lessons this comes naturally to him. It makes him feel closer to the Force, in a way, like he’s on the right track and not a complete screw-up, using it to delicately untangle in his mind the archaic languages they’re written in and absorb their teachings all at once. 

Normally the smooth glide of the brush across the parchment and the shine of the dark ink before it dries calms him, but he can’t seem to quiet his mind after the whiplash day he’s just had. 

_ Senth, peth, leth, isk, trill.  _ He glides the brush across the page, keeping the letters tight and neat. He’s stagnating, struggling to lift some damn rocks for kriff’s sake, but he can’t pinpoint what the problem is. He feels untethered, free-floating, and it’s incredibly disorienting. What is he meant to believe? Luke’s methods are strange and seem pointless, directionless, but he tells him when he’s made a mistake and what he’s doing wrong. It’s infuriating, endlessly so, but when he looks back to when he first got here he  _ has  _ made progress. He found success much quicker in the room with no doors, it’s true, but how is he supposed to learn and gain control if his teacher hides things from him? He replays the stones stacking themselves over and over in that room in his head, watching them settle so gently even as he lost his focus yet again. 

_ Who is he supposed to believe?  _

He’s so turned around and torn he’s sure he wouldn’t know up from down if he fell off his cot, and he almost drips a glob of ink onto the page before he catches up to himself and pulls his hand away, stops. The next line of the text is jumbled, keeps swirling around in his head when he tries to Force-read it. It won’t settle on any meaning in his head that he can make sense of, and he’s actually relieved when he realizes he’s stuck. 

He’s reached a stand-still in his copying and there’s still a while left until sleep, and he can go get Luke’s opinion on the translation and sort of bury the saber, as it were. Luke will see his dedication and that he really does want to be here, and he can feel out the incident with the lesson and find out just how thin the ice is that he’s standing on. He’s not sure how he’s hoping to feel once he speaks to him, but he’s hoping for anything better than how he’s feeling now, like he’s got one leg on either side of a canyon that’s slowly spreading farther and farther apart. Torn.

Right. He checks the line a few more times and makes sure it’s absolute nonsense, scoops up the text carefully and marks the page, and ducks out of his hut, heading towards his uncle’s preferred evening haunt.    
  


\--

 

The courtyard where group meditation is held is usually the best place to find Luke outside of his own sprawling schedule, and tonight is no different as Ben hears his voice speaking softly from where he’s climbing the shallow few steps around the entrance. 

Only his isn’t the only voice hushed and tucked into the night. 

It’s Samira, or it sounds most like her from their whispering, talking to Luke out in the courtyard and the both of them draped in sickly moonlight. They haven’t heard him approach, and he tucks up close against one of the thick stone pillars that radiate around the space, hidden from view. 

Samira had been one of the others who looked at him with fear in her eyes, that morning at the lesson. Fear was worse than the laughter. 

“...n’t know why we have to practice with him. Can’t you train him on his own, somewhere else?” Samira whispers, wringing her hands in front of her. She still looks scared. 

“He has the right to the opportunity to learn from all of you as well as from me, just as you do. As every student here does, you know that. Fairness, balance-”

“Nothing about having to be near him is  _ fair, _ ” She cuts Luke off, her voice raising slightly. “He’s dangerous, and until he learns to put a lid on that temper Master Luke... I don’t feel I can safely focus on my own training.”

Luke looks sad, wistful, and he puts a hand on her shoulder. Ben wants to put his fist through the stone. “Ben is… different, he’s. He’s stubborn, and strong-willed, and I know those two things don’t make for a fun learning environment, trust me.” He chuckles, actually  _ chuckles  _ gruff into the night air, Ben’s about two seconds from storming out there just to see Luke caught being a horrible fucking gossip. 

“He’s gonna hurt someone, Master Luke, probably soon.” Samira’s eyes are hard in the moonlight, or they might be, Ben can’t really tell. His vision is starting to swim. 

He hears Luke sigh, heavy and weary and one hundred percent because of Ben Solo. 

“I know.”

It’s quiet, defeated, and sounds like  _ giving up.  _

Ben spins on his heel and marches away, away from the courtyard and the fear in Samira’s eyes and Luke Skywalker’s fucking grizzled vacant face because  _ he’s given up on me, I’m a lost cause a fuckup a worthless fuckup I’m gonna  _ hurt  _ someone-  _

He drops the text in the wet grass, doesn’t stop to pick it up. He hopes the ink bloats and runs and smears all to hell, hopes that whoever picks it up it falls apart in their hands and no one can ever read it again.

He marches back to his hut and swipes at his eyes hard with his knuckles, doesn’t slow down. It doesn’t say anything but he knows the voice is there, in his head, listening to him fucking fall apart. He feels it more than he hears actual words, rattling up and down his spine and it sounds like  _ I warned you,  _ feels like _ he’s afraid of you.  _

He feels ice down to his core, betrayal sinking ice-pick fingers into his chest _(_ _ like the air in his room with red walls, stinging his lungs ) _ , then blooming hot and biting with rage ( _ the stone at his feet, fire at his feet and-) _ . 

He gets to his hut, collapses on his knees on the floor just past the draped cloth opening. He shoves his fists into his eyes and wishes for his sharp black robes, his gloves that creak in his fists, and for the room where he’s not a weapon everyone’s afraid of setting off. 

He wishes he was there now, wants so desperately to be anywhere but here with the wind and the ugly green moon and the  _ fucking bugs  _ but whoever is in his head seems to have slipped away again, fading into the whispers in the night and leaving Ben cold, shaking, and alone. 

 

\--

 

Despite the crushed-rubble feeling inside his rib cage the world did not follow suit and cave in on him in the night. Whispering trees still stand at the edge of the compound and the temple still sits squat and uneven and filtering sunlight through the stones when he wakes, just as it’s been every morning since he’s come to study under it. The others still lope sleepily from their own huts and make their way to the courtyard for morning meditation, dressed in robes identical to his. To promote unity, like they’re all a team in this together, and not the organized line of holochess pieces with a sabacc card thrown in that it felt like to Ben.  _ The Idiot, _ he thinks. That’s the card he’d be. Or, he swallows.  _ The Evil One.  _

That thought sat heavy in his throat as he dressed and walked to the courtyard, shuffling cards behind his eyes until the warm grass under his crossed legs and the Force humming around him blurred the thought away. 

When they break for a meal Ben blinks around at his peers, his Master, waits for things to be different. Waits for Luke to side-eye him and know that he knows, that he heard, waits for the others who spoke to him casually over garden roots and blue milk to stop doing so, but nothing changes. Luke doesn’t look at him any differently than he has been, lights behind his watery eyes dimmer than they had been so long ago now - _ and how long has he been seeing a monster wearing Ben’s robes?-  _ Luca still shows Ben when he adds another woven reed bracelet to the collection on his wrist and Orin still gently asks him to crack her bristlemelon open when she can’t manage it and-

The day goes on. 

Meditation, breakfast, lessons, lecture, mid-meal. Leisure time, meditation, lessons, supper. Meditation, sleep. 

He breathes in, he breathes out. 

 

\--

 

The lessons don’t all go terribly. 

Some of them he’s not even half bad at, and while it doesn’t erase Luke’s words under the greasy moonlight it helps him forget, for a while, about what a terrible Jedi he’s shaping up to be. 

Because he still fucks up, he still loses control of both the Force and his temper, but the others fail too, sometimes. He’s not the only one learning, making mistakes, and that comforts him even as he watches Luke fix their stance or murmur encouragement with a gentleness that isn’t brittle and forced (afraid of you afraid of you  _ afraid of you-)  _ like that which he shows Ben. 

They still talk, behind his back and in each others’ heads because of course they do, they’re all young and restless and crammed on a tiny planet together moving rocks and meditating and singing kumbaya. But somehow some of them haven’t gotten the memo that they’ve all got the same party trick and he can  _ hear  _ them thinking to each other about his latest spectacle of a mistake, how he sits alone at meals more often than not, or even his goddamn  _ ears,  _ like they’re fucking toddlers on the playground pulling braids. He ignores them, mostly, or tries to, and thinks that if they’re as scared of him as they sometimes act, they’re making awful big targets of themselves for when the explosives he’s apparently made of go off and carve a crater into the treeline. 

But he doesn’t think about that, because he’s not sharp and pulled spring-trap tight poised to hurt anyone, he’s not an enemy here. He’s a student, just like everyone else under the wind-worn stones of the temple, and yes he fails and they talk but when the suns set they’re all on the same side, they’re on his team. He is a Jedi like his uncle before him. End of story. 

(Maybe if he thinks it hard enough and often enough, it’ll be true.)

Days and nights and eventually weeks pass, and all things at the temple go as they have, as they do. Meditation, anger, lessons, lecture, failure. Meditation, peace, lecture, lessons, progress. And on, and on. 

Luke has been patient, is always patient, but less and less kind as Ben’s shortcomings come closer and closer together. They’re in the bordered training grounds where they spar and more mobile meditation one afternoon when he doesn’t even try to remain neutral.

They’re all sitting in a line, legs tucked underneath them, when Luke pulls out the long wooden training staffs he’d made by hand. Three of them are broken. 

Luke sighs, put upon, and Ben isn’t surprised when he says right away, “Ben, did you-”

He  _ is  _ surprised when Watop cuts in, smooth and unfiltered as he always is, “No way Ben did that, have you seen him with a saber? He doesn’t even need the practice.” He leans forward to give Ben a grin, before turning back to Luke. “It was probably Asha, she’s been trying to nail that spin move you showed us last week and she’s got wampa fists, she’s always breaking shit. Uh, Master.”

Luke gives him a scrunched-down look and ignores Asha’s grunt of protest. “Language, kid,” He looks to Ben, still unconvinced. “Ben, where were you after-”

Again he is interrupted, and Ben can’t remember the last time he felt like he belonged here, sitting in a line in the grass. 

“He was with me, Master Luke, after training. We were collecting fruit to make colored ink, for the texts, sir.” Vilha offers, tucking a long mousy brown braid behind one dark ear and flicking her eyes up to his uncle.  

Ben knows that Luke must have found the soggy remains of the text he’d been transcribing where he’d dropped it outside the temple, but he says nothing so neither does Ben. He just looks at Vilha where she’s twisting her hair around her finger but not backing down from Luke’s gaze. 

“Uh huh,” Luke says, sounding unconvinced and looking at each of them in turn before tossing the broken staffs aside. He turns to Asha, who’s flushed red with embarrassment. “Well then, as long as you take it easy on my equipment and show me that perfected move I guess we’ll call it even.”

Ben bristles at the easy-off he gave her, knows he’d be given the ‘Ben-I’m-so-disappointed-in-you’ stare for who knows how long before some other kid who’s not related to him needed guidance, then he’d be off and cracking jokes while he steadied their stance and Ben’s blood would evaporate and steam out his ears for how hot it would be boiling. 

But they’d stood up for him, the others, even though nothing came out of it for them and he can’t for the life of him figure out why they did it. He tries regardless to wear it like armor against the disconsolate and far-away look Luke is settling onto him like a heavy coat around his shoulders, stifling.

He can’t even keep the comfort of these moments close for when he needs them, rare as they are, without the scales tipping and something horrible having to come careening into his life.

 

\--

 

Even on days when Ben is sweating and sore and ready to renounce the Force entirely their lessons here still catch at his ankles, and  _ balance balance balance _ permeates all things and sits like squirming writhing things in his stomach. It feels like he’s not allowed to have any good thing in his life without poison seeping into them like ink spilled across parchment. He still feels like a defective part left out of the whole, and most of them still avoid him at meals, but some scoot over and make room for him to sit. Luca has moved on to braided cords weaving through his yellow hair, Orin shows him with pride-pink cheeks that she can open her own melons. He smiles at them and it doesn’t hurt.

(The hurt comes later, when he’s alone and insects whisper outside.)

He gets to smile and joke with people he thinks he’s probably allowed to call his friends, but when he’s alone in his hut and the wind and the bugs are too loud, roaring in his ears, he dreams. 

He dreams of yanking the cords from Luca’s head and strangling him with them, of taking the heavy melon from Orin’s hand and bringing it up then bringing it down and down and down until every tooth in her face is pointing the wrong way. 

Sometimes Cander and Trinna tug him down to the river to swim, shedding robes and worries and laughing themselves sick when chaakrabbits make off with their clothes. He comes back to his hut with his face aching from smiling and dreams of holding their heads under the water until the bubbles stop, using the Force so he can look straight down through the mirage of the water and watch the fight leave their eyes. 

He wakes up screaming, always screaming. 

Eventually the dreams don’t need a good day to come and rain on, staining him from the inside out every single night, good days ruined and bad days made worse and inescapable even in sleep. He starts to think that maybe he  _ is _ a loose live wire, cut loose and dangerous, just some sharp thing meant to slice and gut and tear apart anyone who tries to come close.  

Eventually he starts eating alone on purpose. 

He doesn’t speak to Luca or Orin or Cander or Trinna, doesn’t look at them when they ask him to come sit, to come down to the river, to train. He can’t trust that the Ben from his dreams won’t claw his way up his throat while the sun is still out, he can’t risk putting fear in their eyes and knowing they’re right to be afraid. 

He cuts himself out of the group like the bad spot on an apple, and the dreams don’t go away but he’s no longer hurting people in them, and it would feel like a victory if he wasn’t so exhausted, lately. Spending his days pulling every muscle to keep himself reigned in, and spending every night tearing everything apart. 

He sits alone, eats alone, trains alone, and the voice in his head tells him they’re happy he’s left them alone even as they risk worried glances when they think he isn’t looking. Talk about him in their heads. It tells him they’re jealous of his power and were only pretending to tolerate him, look how exhausted they look, so tired of being  _ false  _ and  _ weak  _ and  _ you don’t need them, I know what you’re capable of, you could snap their necks or slice them up or hold them under- _

It’s fine (it’s not), he can handle it (not for long). At least he’s not hurting anyone, not when the sun is up. 

Most nights, now, he dreams of himself dying. It happens in different ways, and he generally doesn’t think of himself as an overly creative person, but. It’s always someone he knows, trying to kill him, trying to pry something out of his hands and killing him when he won’t give it to them. Sometimes it’s Han, shooting him point blank with his blaster and looking at him like shit on his boots. Once it was Chewie, picking him up and screaming into his face before ripping his arms off of his body. Sometimes it’s Luke, standing over him with a lightsaber and dicing him up, snarling and spitting as he raises his hands and  _ please Uncle Luke, I’m sorry, I didn’t-! _

Every time he wakes with a jolt, panting and sweaty and so tense his body aches all over, never knowing if he’s fully awake or still has one foot sunk low in the mud of the dream. Sleep comes less and less easily for him, and he tries to be glad for it through the bone-deep weariness that settles over him like a heavy, oppressive blanket. 

 

\--

 

The moon is full, the insects whisper on the wind, and tonight, the dream is different. 

He’s standing atop a huge hideous creature with lifeless red eyes and a jaw so wide and gaping it’s large enough to eat a planet whole. It’s convulsing, writhing beneath him as he tries to hold on and it’s cracking its jaws open, wrenched wide and wailing and he wants to cover his ears but he can’t, if he lets go he’ll fall and its nothing but deep black space around him. There were stars a minute ago, stars dusting the velvety black around him that is now empty, and the creature’s jaw has snapped shut and  _ where  _ did the stars go, it’s so  _ dark-  _

It’s snowing, and he’s standing knee-deep in it but he doesn’t feel the cold. Trees rasp overhead and it sounds like his name,  _ Ben… Ben… Ben… Ben-  _

_ BEN! _

Ben is standing in the snow and his father is there too, aged and grimacing and not dressed for the cold. Ben takes a step towards him and tries to feel something, relieved to see him or angry for sending him away or annoyed that he’s not wearing a coat, he’s gonna get sick and then they’ll  _ both  _ hear it from Leia-

He takes one more step and suddenly he can’t take another because Han is there, toe-to-toe with him, silent but looking like he wants to speak. Ben shakes his head and doesn’t know why, like his body is moving without him and he’s sitting inside his own head, watching. 

Ben hears the crackle-hum of the air splitting around plasma and it’s too late, he can’t react or do anything but watch as he thrusts the saber deep into his father’s chest. There’s blood, there’s so much blood but some of it is the blade, it’s- it’s  _ red,  _ his saber is red and hissing and spitting out sparks that burn his hands through- 

Through black gloves that creak where he squeezes the hilt, pushes it deeper. Han opens his mouth to scream but all he hears is his mother, screaming in a way that sounds like her soul tearing apart, like pain and  _ fear  _ and  _ Ben, you’re a monster-!  _

He hears the crackle-hum of splitting air, louder than it was just a second before. 

He opens his eyes. 

The moonlight on the walls is more vibrant than Ben’s ever seen it, and warmer. That can’t be right. 

He blinks his eyes a few times to clear them, but that vivid green stays stuck to the wall, his shadow cut out of it in harsh black shapes. It’s not snowing, he’s in his bed, in his hut, in Luke’s paradise. It wasn’t real, it was just a dream, but he’s not dreaming anymore and that electric hum vibrating the air around him isn’t going away. 

His stomach twists violently and his heart falls through his chest, through the cot, through the floor. He hopes to every god he can think of and every star in the sky that he’s still in it, the bad dream, when he rolls over and sees his uncle poised to chop him to pieces. His face is thrown into a twisted veneer by the harsh light and harsher shadows, and his eyes are so dark and deep with hatred Ben can’t breath, he can’t think, he’s about to die and really he  _ can’t breath-  _

The voice had been telling him for months that this would happen, he’d seen it in more dreams than he could count but it would never happen, it couldn’t, it can’t. He’d seen it happen when the sun was down over and over and over, and after he’d hug his pillow close and cry, beg the force not to let it happen just in case it was a thing capable of listening.

But it’s not, it seems, and the sun is down but the moon is big and full and Luke is filling his room with hot green moonlight and this can’t be real, he’s stuck in a dream and he just needs to wake up, wake up  _ wake up-  _

The heat of it feels like it’s burning his face, he smells the rain as it drips from Luke’s hood and falls sizzling and spitting onto the blade and he’s- 

He’s not dreaming. 

He’s not dreaming, and he doesn’t want to die. 

He reaches out almost without thinking, pure instinct jerking his training saber across his desk to smack into his hand. His brushes and ink tin clatter to the floor as he ignites the blade, pouring searing blue light into the room that’s already so full it’s going to burst, explode, burn both of them up. 

Luke rears back, arms bent in vicious lines and a sickly green flickering in his eyes. Before he can swing forward and drag this nightmare into reality ( _ he used to hold me in those arms, swing me onto his shoulders and higher Uncle Luke, higher-! _ ) Ben thrusts out his other hand, tangles his fingers in the Force-web woven around every stone in the walls of his hut, and yanks. 

The stones leap from the wall like the frogs down by the river but  _ wrong, everything about this is wrong-  _ and the entire thing comes down, crashing around the man who gave him his first lightsaber and the man who tried to chop him up with one. 

He thinks he hears Luke scream, try to say something as Ben’s world is  _ actually  _ crumbling around him but he doesn’t hear what it is over the thud of his feet in the grass that is pressed flat and unnatural in wide berths around every step, the roaring of blood in his ears as he runs and runs and  _ runs.  _

His cheeks are wet and sting in the wind but he doesn’t know when he started crying, can’t tell what his body is doing or feeling over the stifling fog of everything being  _ wrong. _

He can’t help but feel (like a slimy wet stone in his throat) that something had been trying to warn him this would happen, had whispered to him between failed lessons and meals taken alone that he'd kill for it, Ben’s power, if Luke Skywalker can’t have it for himself no one can. Ben had done his best not to listen, to shove those thoughts out of his head as fast as they slithered in, but now he wishes he had. Maybe then he could’ve been more prepared for when everything came crashing down around him like the stones of his hut at his feet. Bare feet, he sleeps barefoot, he…  

He’d been sleeping, he’d- He was just in bed, he’s wearing his kriffing  _ pajamas-  _

He can’t think right now, he can’t swallow what this means or where he’s going or  _ what is he going to fucking do,  _ so he runs. He runs and runs and runs until he doesn’t know where he is, until his lungs are screaming and he can taste blood at the back of his throat and then he keeps running, no sound at all on the entire beautiful fucking planet except his ragged breathing and the slap slap slap of his feet on slippery wet grass. He’s still clutching his the hilt of his saber in his fist, hand wrapped around it so hard it would be painful if he had room inside him to feel anything other than  _ he’d been sleeping, Luke had- In his sleep, looked at him like- tried to-  _

He stumbles to a stop in the grass when he realizes like a punch to the gut that he is now completely, utterly alone. 

He falls where he stands, strings cut, his knees squelching in the mud. Saber still held tight.

If he somehow found his way off this soggy place his parents would side with Luke because when haven’t they, he’s the expert on all this ‘Force hokum’ that makes their son break plates and talk back to his mother. Han’s never understood a damn thing about him  _ or  _ the Force, and apparently everyone in the universe knows what’s best for him and he’s just some dumb kid with anger problems and hereditary magic tricks. And his mother, his mother has a government to run, people to guide who are not related to her. She’s never had much time for him, even when he wasn’t fucking everything up. The others students would never believe him, even the ones who’d had his back would scramble to whatever side Luke stands on, because no one would be stupid enough to stand between him and an angry beam of plasma. Not a single soul in the galaxy will believe him over  _ the  _ Luke Skywalker, Jedi legend. 

A distinct tickling in the back of his brain tells him with a sluice of of cold water down his spine that he’s not alone, not entirely. Or is it the rain? 

It’s not saying anything but he knows the voice is there with him now, listening. It swoops around his head in restless circles, agitated, like it’s just as shocked as he is. There’s that, at least, he thinks. He’s knelt in a heap the grass and mud somewhere between the temple and wherever the fuck he’s supposed to go now and he clings to its presence in his head, to the only friend he’s got left. 

He sinks his fingers deep into the cold earth. “Please,” his voice is hoarse, as if he’s been screaming. “Please just, tell me where to go from here.” He squeezes his eyes shut against the hot wetness in them. “Tell me what to do now.” 

The voice is silent, content to watch him split apart at every crooked seam he has, and he’s about to start thinking that maybe it too is plotting against him when stops. 

The pallid moonlight turns the backs of his hands a blinding white, moles standing out like inverted stars. But the light is wavering, dimming in and out, and when he looks up he sees great sheets of mist floating ethereally up and away from the crashing and churning water of the Falls. 

He’d seen this place only in brief flashes, the moment he stepped foot off the shuttle what seems like a lifetime ago. It’s a towering outcrop of rock that caps off the line of craggy mountains that nearly bisect the planet. It looms darkly above him now as it did in his vision all that time ago, a scooped out shell of hard stone glimmering like obsidian as the thunderous crash of run-off from the mountains careens over it and into an endlessly swirling pool below. It had struck him like a wrong chord plucked inside his rib cage, reverberating through him and setting every hair on his body standing on end. The sweeping plains and serene, effortless beauty before his eyes cut with the dark and dripping jut of the Falls when he closed them was so jarring he’d stumbled, and Luke had laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and said cryptically, “Powerful Light, powerful Dark. Balance, in all things.” Ben hadn’t known what he meant then, but he feels like maybe he does now. 

The rush of the water pounds inside his skull and the horrible pallor of the moonlight is making him sick to his stomach so he stands, one foot and then the other and on towards the shadowy magnetism of the rocks. Hoping for something, anything, to point him in a direction that doesn’t hurt. 

He walks steadily towards the violent churning even though he knows it will kill him. It wouldn’t be the first thing that’s tried tonight, and he almost laughs if it wouldn’t rip him apart from the inside out and hurtle him into the vortex at his feet. He’s not sure what he’s doing only that the itching in his brain seems to want him to, and it’s guiding him steadily as he climbs over rock after slimy wet rock, getting closer and closer to the rock wall. 

He inches along, trying to decide if he’d be terribly upset if he just slipped in and let it rip him apart, stopped existing, when he notices a dark gap just behind where the water is falling fast enough to be deadly. He inches closer, slowly, and with a quick hop through closed eyes he tumbles into a surprisingly dry and sizable cave, hewn into the rock and hidden behind the crashing of the Falls. This he had not seen in his vision.

The space is wide and carved tall, walls hewn rough and jagged and gouged out of the rock, but the far back wall of the cave is like tempered glass, splintered with cracks and hazy but stretching up until it disappears into the ceiling, ethereally smooth. It should reflect the tumbling falls directly across the cave entrance in its mirror-sheen but it doesn’t, something deeper and dark clouding it just below the surface. It’s quieter here, too, which is strange because the echo of the churning water should be deafening bouncing around the chamber, but it isn’t. It’s muted and fuzzy, almost like he’s stepped into another world entirely. 

A lot of things about this place should not be yet are, a fugue-reality as tangible around him as the rock underfoot and hanging like cotton in the air, energy so thick he feels like he has to wade through it until he’s standing before the smooth stone. 

He can’t even see his own reflection, even standing this close, and he can  _ feel  _ this dark thing behind this crack in reality, pulsing, swirling,  _ wanting,  _ it wants-

It wants to show him something, he can feel it like hooks in his skin, he cannot look away. 

It wants to show him something and he wants so desperately to  _ see. _

He sinks to his knees under the weight of this place, tears squeezing out and rolling down his face, splashing onto the dustless stone floor. 

Slowly he raises a palm just shy of touching the ice of the surface, trembling in the air, and opens his mind to whatever this place wants to give him, what it brought him here for. He begs it to show him how to stop this pain that’s filling him up like a poison, staining every bone in his body, show him how to snuff his heart out in his chest and stop everything, everything,  _ everything- _

The moment his hand settles on the stone it’s like he shudders through a membrane of reality, stumbling into a space between the cracks in the wall’s surface. This place is dark, shrouded completely in thick fog that swirls at his feet, feet that can’t even feel the ground beneath him. It stretches on endlessly in every direction, no places to leave or places to hide, but like his room with red walls it doesn’t scare him, like it probably should. 

He starts walking, moving towards a shape in the distance. His chest feels tight and tugged forward with every step, the only indication he’s going the right way. Eventually the shape becomes a wall, a mirror, looming above him as he stops before it. It’s identical to the one he must be staring into now, where he left his body and plunged his mind here through the cracks. 

A shadowy figure writhes behind the frosted wall, shapeless and undefined. Waiting for him to ask the right question. 

Just as he’d done with the Falls silent at his back, he raises a palm. Presses it to the stone. 

A flash of images swim across his vision, flicking so fast from one to the next and pulsing behind his eyes; An enormous tree struck by lightning, a single branch falling with a crack to the ground. Vined flowers twist and choke the branch, sprout up around and all over it, thorns pushing through the delicate green skin long and sharp. A firm hand on a thin shoulder, plates shattering, someone cutting roots for dinner and that same hand guiding the one holding the blade. A figure alone, out in a blizzard and nearly swept away, and a light blinking on in the distance. Smoke from a warm place with an open door. 

They fizzle out and leave him blinking, eyes watering, staring into the dark mass as it gets closer and closer, taking shape. It’s so close now, tall and nearly discernible through the glass, and he closes his eyes. Pulls in a deep breath. 

_ Show me who I’m meant to be.  _

He feels the air shift around him, and when he opens his eyes there’s a person standing on the other side of the mirror, hand raised and pressed exactly to his. 

He’s taller but not by much, Ben’s been taller than everyone he knows since he shot up at fourteen. His hair is the color of a starless sky and long, falling around his face in waves. His face, which has those inverse-stars in exactly the same places as Ben’s own, and his own eyes shine down at him through the hard planes of this man’s-  _ his-  _ face. He’s wearing black robes that go all the way up to his neck that are  _ so  _ familiar, and he can see in the hard line of his shoulders that this is someone powerful, someone who wears the fear of others like armor and not like a tattered shroud of disgrace. In the leather of his black gloves Ben can see that this is someone who’s never been hurt, lied to, almost chopped to pieces by someone who told him they love him. 

If Ben acts, if he does what needs to be done, this is a man he can become. 

The man keeps his eyes locked on Ben’s and he nods, slow and final. To make it stop, this pain and hurt that was kindled to life inside him when Luke wielded the hot moonlight against him, it  _ all  _ has to stop. It all has to end. 

The question was barely a fleeting thought across his mind, a whisper of  _ how-?  _ before a vicious crossguard saber spits and bleeds to life in the man’s hand, like the one laying half-sketched back in the ruin of his hut. His own eyes are hard and sure boring into him from this solemn man’s face, and mind is made up. He knows what he has to do. 

He just hopes his shaking hands will be steady enough to do it. 

He sucks in a punctured breath and shudders back into the cave, the muted crash of the falls fading back into his hearing. His hand is hot now where it’s pressed to the stone, the hilt of his lightsaber sitting heavy in his other hand.

He hears the Falls, crashing against the stone, and he hears something else, too. 

Footsteps, the squeak of bare feet on wet stone. He turns, terrified for half a second that Luke has followed him here, chased him down to finish the job. Instead he turns around to a handful of the other students, climbing into the cave just as he had and helping each other inside. They’re wearing their own sleep robes, exactly like his own, and they look dazed, confused, as if pulled from sleep. 

“Ben?”

His stomach falls through his knees, and he gets to his feet. If they’re here just as he is, could it mean- “Luke, did he-” His voice is choked, raspy, and he can’t finish. Can’t say it. 

“Did he what?” Luca says, swiping wet hair and braided cords out of his eyes. 

“We um, we felt- something,” Vilha offers, stepping further into the cave to avoid the spray of the Falls. “Something woke me up and I felt, I don’t know, like…”

“Like someone needed help.” Orin says, hair over one eye but the visible one meeting his fiercely. 

“All of you?” Ben asks, looking at each of them in turn. If they sensed he needed help, why not show up when Luke had his saber raised? Why here, why now?

Cander nods, a hand on Orin’s shoulder. “It was the same for me, and when I walked out of my hut I wasn’t the only one. I think the Force-” He hesitates. “Pulled us here, together, but…” He looks around at the jagged scoops in the walls, out at the rushing water. “Why here?”

“Seriously,” Watop adds, giving a dubious look to the smooth rock mirror over Ben’s shoulder. “Why  _ this  _ freaky-ass place? I’m pretty sure I’ve had nightmares about this hunk of rock.”

Ben doesn’t answer,  _ can’t  _ answer, he has no idea why he ran all the way here other than it felt like where he needed to go, someone wanted him to-

“Ben…” Trinna asks, uncharacteristically timid. “What happened?” 

“Luke. he-” He swallows back the fire trying to come up his throat. “He tried to kill me. Came into my hut with his saber, while I slept.” He grips his own saber tighter in his fist, thumb hovering over the ignition switch. He meets each of their eyes with some of the fire in this throat, daring them to tell him he’s crazy and that he’s lying and sealing their fate where they stand. It all has to end. 

Silence rings loud in the cave, each of them shocked and staring at him, looking to each other. Vilha’s hands are over her mouth, a single tear slides down Orin’s cheek. Watop isn’t smiling. 

Eventually Luca speaks, and it sweeps the ground out from under him. 

“We were worried this might happen.” He sounds as heartbroken and scared as Ben feels, and he can’t do anything but gape at them. 

“You thought- you  _ considered  _ it happening? How-”

“We see how he looks at you,” Trinna says, almost defensively like she can’t believe Ben is surprised. “We know he’s your uncle, but. We’re not blind, Ben, everyone in this fucking place can  _ feel _ it when he looks at you like something different from the rest of us.” 

All this time. All this time he thought he’d been alone, swinging fists in every direction because no one understands, no one could possibly stand in his shoes and be the model student Luke seems to think he should be. But looking around and seeing the others nodding, standing here with him after everything has fallen apart, he-

He knows now, why these six have come. It’s not many who would believe the resident fuckup over Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master.   

“You needed help, and the Force led us here.” Cander says, chin out and shoulders squared. “The whole kriffing point of being here is to trust what the Force is telling us, and now, with this…” He looks around, silently confirming with the others. “Luke can’t take this back.” 

“None of us want to be the next one he comes for in our sleep.” Vilha says with a sniff, her voice trembling but strong. “He made his choice, and now we’ve made ours.”

Ben still can’t believe that a minute ago he was shivering and alone in a cave full of fog and now he’s a part of a whole, pieces scattered but all of them connected. 

He stands up taller, tries to sound sure, like someone they’d want to follow. “We have to leave, we need to get off this fucking planet.” He looks around the space, sees the spaces between these six. “They’re not going to let us.” 

“We have no choice now,” Watop says, voice hard and still not smiling. “It’s us or him.” 

“You know what this means,” Ben says, looking down at his saber as he holds it higher. He flicks his eyes to them. “What has to be done.”

They all look like they’ve aged ten years as they look to each other and then to him, grave and settling under the weight of their decision. He’s going to make sure they know it was the right one, if they come out of this alive he’ll make sure none of them are ever made to feel like he has. Alone, dangerous, a mistake. He’s never had anyone he so fiercely wanted to protect, not in such a long time, and he’d tear down anyone he had to to keep them safe. When they look at him they don’t someone to run from, but someone worth protecting in turn. He knows they see the redness of his eyes and the bottoms of his feet, scraped bloody. 

As one they hold up their own sabers, and look to him. He nods, they nod back. 

Good. Time to finish this. 

 

\--

 

When they reach the temple the others have woken as well, the ones who felt a call through the Force and did not go to him. 

They went to Luke. 

They’re gathered around the rubble of Ben’s hut, kneeling around Luke who’s laying in the mess, not moving. Unconscious, Ben can feel it, but still breathing. They all stand as Ben and the others walk up. 

“What happened?” One of them asks frantically, Samira, he thinks. “I felt-  _ we  _ felt, and then-”

“Luke tried to murder me in my sleep. He’s not our Master anymore.” Ben breathes and tried to sound like the man he saw in the cave. 

“You’re lying,” Another spits, a stocky Twi’lek called Nicodemus. “Luke would never hurt us, you probably attacked him.”

“We all knew it was just a matter of time,” Someone else sneers, a pinch-faced girl named Delcep. 

The other standing with them nod, look at him like a dangerous animal. They don’t believe him, just like he knew they wouldn’t. They’ve chosen their side, standing around Luke; the Force told them that someone needed help, and they took four steps outside their beds and made up their minds, condemned him without a thought. 

They’ve chosen their sides, and with his allies at his back he feels fire and anger like bile at the back of his throat. 

“He can’t give you what you want,” He tries to take the pain and us it to spur him on, steady his voice. “I know that better than anyone. He failed me and he will fail all of you, he made his choice and now it’s all over.

The others come up behind him until they’re level, standing in a line facing off against the confused and angry faces huddled in a clump before them. Luca puts a hand on his shoulder, he breathes in. Breathes out. 

“You’re with him, or you’re with me.” 

He kicks one leg out into an open stance and ignites his saber, the brilliant blue of it catching the fear in their eyes and setting it ablaze. They scramble back, staying between him and Luke, and after a decisive moment they all draw their own sabers. They arrange themselves in a protective ring around Luke, and they’ve made their choice. 

The fear hurts but the betrayal hurts deeper, they’re supposed to be here becoming Jedi  _ together,  _ and now he has to cut them all down because they stood beseeched by the Force exactly where his true allies had but they chose  _ wrong, _ they won't  _ listen-  _

His- his  _ friends  _ have their sabers drawn too, the light of all dozen or so between them drowning out the horrible moonlight in a tangle of blazing white. They all stand there, frozen, no one willing to back down but no one really wanting to hurt each other either (and damn sure nobody’s ready for what they’ve all decided has to be done.)

Before anyone moves it starts to rain, drizzling and cold and making their sabers hiss and spit as drops collide with the plasma. It seems as good a sign as any, and as one the two groups rush at each other. 

Sabers clash and squeal into the night and the fucking bugs are whispering on the wind, someone is yelling but it’s impossible to tell who. He’s swinging and kicking out in every direction, swiping rain from his eyes and praying he can tell who’s who in the sudden pissing rain. 

Someone runs at him with a yell, Asha, not one of his own, and they raise their arms at the same time, the blue of saber screeching and grinding against the orange of her own. Swing-block, swing-parry, swing-miss-miss and on, until Ben throws out a leg and sweeps her feet out from under her, her saber knocked out of her hand. He’s got his saber to her throat, her hands up and her eyes pleading, projecting into his head a jumbled litany of  _ please don’t I’m sorry I don’t want to die I want to go home I don’t want to do this I don’t want to die  _ and he hesitates. The plasma of his blade spitting sparks that burn her throat and make her jump, but he holds it just above the flesh. 

Her parents probably didn’t send her away to be rid of him, like his did. They probably stay up at night wishing they could holo-call, they probably  _ miss her  _ and  _ what is he doing?  _

Just like Luke if he does this there’s no going back, he’ll be changed if he does this, but where does he go moving forward if he doesn’t? Maybe-

Suddenly he’s yanked from the wet field in front of the temple and slammed into that place in his head, the room with no doors, stumbling into the gloom. He lands hard on his knees and when he looks down he’s still wearing his sleep robes, soaked through with mud and rainwater. The stone floor is cold beneath his feet, like wet grass, or-  

“Why aren’t you  _ taking  _ what the Force is giving you, boy? This  _ opportunity.”  _ The voice bellows down at him, seething and angry and  _ the voice is never angry with him, it’s on  _ his side- “Handed to you on a platter and you toss it aside, like a  _ fool. _ ” 

He struggles to his feet, hands empty. He balls them into fists. “I don’t-” 

“Look how they seek to destroy you even as they pale against your power, your  _ potential.  _ They don’t see you as a person Benjamin, they see you as a threat and they aren't hesitating, why are you?”

Ben blinks and suddenly they’re there, the students standing against him, wielding their sabers confidently where just a moment ago out in the rain their hands shook with fear, and looking at him with pure hatred burning in their eyes. Asha is with them, her orange saber blazing in her grip, and she  _ played  _ him, lied to him,  _ betrayed him-  _

His saber falls from somewhere high and clangs loudly against the stone, rolls to a stop at his feet. 

“They will not show you mercy, boy, they will not let you continue to surpass them because they are weak and selfish and they  _ will  _ destroy you if you don’t fight back.” The voice is lecherous, dripping in his ear and down his spine. “There is only one way out of this, one way to make it stop, and you know what it is. You know what you have to do, so let go of your fear and  _ just do _ -” 

A scream of white-hot anger rips from him as he launches into motion, scooping up his saber and flicking it to life, slicing into them in quick, devastating strokes. Rage shakes his arms and makes him sloppy, hacking wherever he can reach but they do not bleed, just flicker out of existence with teeth-bared sneers frozen on their faces until only one remains.

It’s Samira, the girl who whispered into his uncle’s ear that one day he was going to  _ hurt someone.  _

He’s never wanted to hurt someone more than he does right now. 

She sneers at him, raises her purple saber, and runs at him. He snarls and spits and runs too, his saber held tucked against him and ready, and when they clash he’s swinging at her so hard and so fast it’s nothing at all to knock her saber away from her. He’s grinning when he thrusts his saber forward, trapped lightning aiming straight for her heart-

As his saber finds her flesh reality abruptly slams back into him, and where she was sneering at him in hatred Samira now looks up at him in utter, heart-wrenching fear. His saber is pushed deep through her chest and as the light leaves her eyes her legs give out, her body sliding off of his blade. There’s blood on her face, she’s coughing it up, and only manages a few breaths before she glazes over, eyes unfocused, and goes. Gone. 

He looks around shakily and sees the others looking to him, dazed, covered in blood. He knows he is too, he can feel it. It’s hot where it’s splashed on his skin and soaked into his clothes but rapidly cooling in the night air. Seven of them stand in the grass wet with rain and with blood, surrounded by violence that cannot be undone.

There’s no one left to stand between him and Luke. 

He looks back down and he can't tear his eyes away from Samira, her face, her eyes. There’s no light in them, not a speck, it’s out in the universe now. One with the force, as they all will be someday. He wonders what her parents are like, how they’ll react when they learn what he’s done to her.  

_ Well done, Benjamin, you’ve taken your destiny into your own hands.  _

The voice sounds smug, as dripping with blood as Ben feels. 

_ I’m sending a shuttle for you, I think it’s time for you and I to meet. You deserve a real teacher, Ben, you deserve  _ everything.  __

Ben feels it withdraw, slither out the backdoor of his brain, and he just stands there in the muck and the massacre and feels himself collapsing, stretching, changing.

He feels like he's tipping tipping tipping, slowly backwards and down, somewhere dark where he cant see the bottom and the greasy green moon is a point of light getting smaller and smaller as he falls. 

He closes his eyes, shuts everything out. 

He hits the bottom. 

He opens his eyes. 

There's blood on his hands and in his hair and on his clothes and as the rain washes it away drop by drop, he is reborn. Ben Solo drips away into the grass as the rain runs off him, and standing in the field of his victory he is someone new. 

He tells them in his new voice that a shuttle is on it’s way, they don’t need to worry, they’re leaving. They do not question him, and he knows he’s done the right thing. What needed to be done. 

They dig around the emergency supplies Luke keeps in storage area on the grounds and each with a fire-starter can in hand they circle the temple. They each hold the scalding flame of change in their hands, and he looks to each of them, searching for the resolve he feels pumping through his every vein, every corner of himself. 

“This isn’t what we came here for.” Cander says, over the wind and the rain and the crackling of the fire in his hands. “It’s not what he told us it was. It needs to burn” 

Ben nods, and as one, they burn the Jedi Order to the ground. 

Stoking the fire and watching it go up he thinks of balance, of scales tipping and flying apart. Nothing will grow here after he's gone, no new life from death and scorched earth. What will Luke Skywalker have to say then about balance? About all things having a place in the Force? The force had never let Ben down, made him feel like a festering wound or transplanted limb that the body of the universe was rejecting, an infection. Not like his family had. Like Luke had. 

As the others watch the flames he strides across the grass on legs that do not shake, over to the remains of the life he is leaving behind. 

The Jedi don’t ascribe to keeping personal belongings, have long ago deemed them frivolous and contrary to the teachings, and Ben’s never felt less like a Jedi in his life as he spitefully stuffs his brush pens and parchment into his robes, his little rock sculptures. His lightsaber, still hot from cutting down the last people who stood in his way. 

The last, except for one. 

He steps through the rubble around Luke's unconscious body and stops. He wants to kill him to, bring his saber down with a sick crack and end it, but with his face slack like that all he sees is his Uncle Luke, losing holochess on purpose and making his toys fly. He bites his cheek until it bleeds but it doesn’t taste any different from their blood, and how the fuck did it get in his mouth, stars, he's gonna throw up but there’s nothing in him but fire fire fire rot  _ anger-  _

_ “Fire kept within only succeeds in burning oneself down,” _ Luke used to say.  _ “When you lash out you’re only hurting yourself.” _

He grinds his teeth until his jaw aches, spits blood across the stones of his old life. He'd make sure everyone who ever lied to him or pretended to care or looked at him like a bomb about to go off would catch the flames from his fingertips and go up like a brush fire. Angry, wild, and over so quickly.  _ Like your precious fucking shrine to ignorance, _ he wants to spit with the blood, but Luke is still out cold so there’s no fucking point. He'd stoke this flame inside him and give it all away, watch them all burn. 

He looks across the grass to the flames licking at the sky, crackling loud even from here. The Jedi temple is a prison, not a sanctuary, a rickety stack of tangled lies and not a place of knowledge and truth. This is where his parents sent him to dampen and mute what makes him who he is, throw a cage around his power and abilities in hopes he'd come home looking like a normal boy. Harmless, shackled, weak. He can't tell the voice in his head from his own thoughts anymore, can't tell when they started to sound the same, but it doesn't matter because whoever it is is speaking truths he’s known for longer than he’d wanted to admit. 

He knows by feel though that it’s left him for now, the voice, that right now standing in the broken shards of everything he’s ever known, he is alone. He hasn't been alone with his thoughts for so long now he doesn't know what to do with the quiet. 

He looks down at Luke’s expressionless face and tries to breath, to remember that this man means nothing to him now because he's someone new, he doesn't have dead-end people in his life anymore who can hurt him. The hand wrapped around his saber is trembling when one of the others calls out that the shuttle is here, just like he told them it would be. He takes a last look down at the man who used to hoist him onto Chewie’s shoulders with the Force, the man who used to bash sticks with him and play-fight before he was old enough to hold a lightsaber. The man who he trusted, who his  _ mother  _ trusted, and who tried to kill him in his sleep. 

He takes a breath, and walks away. 

Let him wake in blood and ash and know what it feels like to have everything ripped away from him while he  _ fucking _ slept. He can keep his ruins, and he can die in them old and useless and broken like they are. He doesn't care, he's a new man now. Luke Skywalker is nothing to him, no one. 

“Luke is dead,” He tells the others as the sleek and unfamiliar shuttle touches down in the grass. “It’s finished.” 

 

\--

 

Standing tall in the shuttle with blood on his clothes the others look to him, and he looks steadfastly out the viewport across the dead space stretching out beyond. The voice in his head is still overlapping curiously with his own, and he isn’t sure if it’s telling him where to direct the shuttle or if he just knows. The man he’s become hardwired with a direction to take. That thought is a comforting one. In any case he hopes it makes him look like he knows what to do now, like the leader he doesn't quite feel like but knows he's supposed to be. He hopes, if nothing else, that he's leading them somewhere better; the stars look cold and uninviting across the tarmac of space and it doesn’t comfort him as the blood dries between his fingers.

_ Under my guidance you will be the most powerful being in the galaxy, _  the voice affirms, settling at the base of his skull. Here to stay. 

_ I can lead you down the path you are truly meant to take. _

He stands tall at the front of his tribe, his new family, as they rattle into hyperspace and out into the unknown. He turns away from the viewport and leaves Ben Solo crying in the mud below, dead with everyone else.

His filthy, bloodsoaked robes look almost black in the dim light of the shuttle.

 

\--

 

Sometimes, on particularly cold or lonely nights Kylo Ren wakes to the stench of blood, the hot hissing of rain evaporating on the blade of a blue lightsaber. That was a lifetime ago, and he's a different man now. The man he'd seen in that shadowy place full of stone and mirrors, a man without a past to fester in his gut (or so he told himself). 

Now he's stars and planets and whole galaxies away from that place and that boy who burned with Luke's temple, but sometimes in dreams he still hears the faint whispers of the insects on that mockery of paradise, and the starlight pouring into his chambers almost looks green before he blinks away sleep and it’s back to cold, emotionless white.

**Author's Note:**

> oof. that was a lot, I know.
> 
> This is the longest oneshot I've ever written, and I'm very proud of how it turned out, woo! 
> 
> Let me know what you think? <3
> 
> hit me up on [tumblr](http://multi-purpose-tool-guy.tumblr.com)!


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